


All the King's Men

by Sorrel



Category: Harry Potter - Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, F/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-11-27
Updated: 2009-11-27
Packaged: 2017-10-03 21:17:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sorrel/pseuds/Sorrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In his Occlumency lessons with the Girl Who Lived, Severus Snape sees something that he doesn't have the right to know.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All the King's Men

Severus worried about Harry. Worry was far from unusual for him, but having that emotion attached to James Potter's daughter felt distinctly odd. He had, in the last four years and change, felt annoyance, rage, panic, and even pride at different intervals, but Severus preferred to save his worry for Slytherins, who as a general rule, needed it more. But then, Harry had a talent for breaking rules, even his own.

The girl even looked like her father. On the first day she came into his class she had too-big glasses and James' prideful strut and hair that surely must have been cut by hedge clippers and a brash manner that had no place in his classroom, but then she'd turned to him and met his gaze and those fearless, defiant green eyes were all Lily's. Over the last few years she had grown into her glasses, and he had begun to see her stride as simply purposeful, much like his own, while the defiance in her gaze had tempered to respect. But they were still Lilly's eyes.

She'd even grown out her hair, and he'd seen her with it tumbling loose and slightly curled in the hallways, though it was always carefully and practically braided in his class. Then a month ago, she had shown up with her hair raggedly chopped off for no apparent reason, and Severus had felt concern. Yesterday, she had come close to blowing up her cauldron, and his concern had escalated to true worry.

Every Saturday, she reported to his office off the Potions classroom for Occlumency lessons, and every Saturday she seemed more pale and drawn when she knocked upon his door. He watched her in the hallways, or in the dining halls at mealtime, and none of her stress showed when she was surrounded by her friends. But then, she was a consummate liar; he had noticed that early in her tenure at Hogwarts. She had lied with the careful, cunning skill of someone who grew up in a poisonous atmosphere, where every word was a grenade for someone to toss back in your direction. Severus could understand that, and could only envy her skill. If only he had had the same when he was younger, and considerably more vulnerable. Matters with the Dark Lord might have turned out considerably different.

But he did not, and they did not, which was why she was here, every Saturday morning, ready for him to reach into her mind and glimpse upon her deepest shames and secrets. All in the name of defending against the Dark Lord. It was a prospect to turn the stomach of any person with sense, but Severus very much feared that there was something worse that left her looking as if she were knocking on death's door.

"Miss Potter." She snapped to attention at the sound of his voice, blinking in surprise when he didn't begin their lesson as he usually did, with a Legilimental attack.

"Yes, professor?"

She was so polite. Even Draco Malfoy couldn't muster up that neutral, careful attentiveness. She wasn't always; he wasn't so foolish as to think her any kind of bland automaton (_her,_ the youngest Seeker in history and a school file as thick as his thumb), but she'd spent time at a boarding school before Hogwarts, he was near to certain of it. He knew the look of someone who'd had proper respect for a teacher beaten into them.

"Are you ill?"

This time, she had control of her expression. "No, professor."

"It in unlike you to make such mistakes as you did in my class yesterday," Severus continued, watching her closely. "You are pale enough to pass for one of the ghosts, and even the dungeons are not chilled enough to warrant the amount of cloth you have wrapped around your person."

Harry glanced down, fast, and pulled one overlong sleeve over the back of one hand. "I'm fine. Sir."

She was patently lying, but just as obviously unwilling to admit the truth. Fair enough; he doubted he would have confessed some disturbance to a teacher in his childhood, either. Several had other methods at his disposal, and blanket permission from the _true _Headmaster of Hogwarts to use them as part of her training. "Very well. Guard."

Her mental defenses snapped into place, but not quickly enough. As the gaps narrowed, he pulled out pieces- a desperate longing for the freedom of riding a broom, worry over that mongrel Black, a seething hatred of the Headmistress. And under it all a vast well of sick shame that ate at her insides. In all his years of training with Legilimency, around some of the most boot-licking followers of the Dark Lord, Severus had never felt its like.

In surprise he did something he had promised himself, privately, that he would not do: he cracked open her shields and reached for the source.

She sensed him doing it, of course, and panic flooded her. She threw other things at him- the linger horror of young Diggory's death, the all-too-familiar aftermaths of these lessons, stifling in some hot, airless space while her brute Muggle cousin laughed outside, and finally something new- _quill clenched in her grip, fire burning across the back of her right hand, she slowly spells out, in her own blood: I WILL NOT TELL LIES-_

Severus broke through the swell, and he tried to pull back, truly he did. He had no desire to infringe this deeply on her privacy, and only startlement had made him reach this deep in the first place. But it was too late and something else broke over his presence in her mind, not a sense memory but a true one, as intrusive as if he had stolen into her pensieve.

_"Is it worth it?" Malfoy whispers. They are alone in a hallway, not even a portrait to witness their conversation. "When the headlines trumpet your oncoming insanity, is it worth to it keep yelling your head off about the Dark Lord's return?"_

Malfoy has her pinned against the wall, one arm trapped behind her, the other held tight in his grip. Harry should be afraid- Malfoy is Seeker-lean, but his latest growth spurt has him outweighing her by a good two or three stone- but instead she smiles. It stretches her mouth in ways she hasn't felt since the days before Hogwarts, when lights-out in the dormitory was just a signal for the next phase of the war.

"I don't know, Malfoy. Does it make you feel like a big man, swaggering around taking points like you're some kind of grown-up?"

"At least I have enough common sense not to piss off the Headmistress. You'd do better to kiss up a little. Merlin knows I've seen you do it before."

"When it didn't *matter,*" Harry snaps. The usual anger comes, finally, leaving her skin feeling hot and itchy and too-small. "People need to *know.*"

"Or maybe you just want to make yourself feel better about getting your precious Cedric killed."

Harry surges forward, wanting nothing but to punch him in his sneering, aristocratic mouth, but Malfoy is ready for it and slams her back against the wall. Her wrist is ground into stone, but she doesn't really feel it through her rage. "I'll kill you."

"You don't do anything, Potter. You never do. Diggory died because you couldn't do anything. How does that feel, when you're lying awake at night?"

Awful, though it's not as though she's willing to admit as much to Malfoy, so she says, "At least I try."

"Oh, yes, you try and try and try. Till you're *dead,* sooner rather than later." Malfoy punctuates this by grinding her harder against the wall. Her hair is getting pulled painfully tight and her wrist is screaming, but she's caught by his intensity, just as she always is. "You don't have the common sense of a flobberworm. If you don't learn how to bend you're going to break."

"Just because you like to kneel doesn't mean the rest of us are willing to lick the Dark Lord's boots."

Malfoy grabs her hair, fists his free hand into the length of it, and yanks her head cruelly back. "You aren't listening to me."

Harry shakes in his grip, terrified by something in his eyes she can't quite name. "Why do you even *care?*" It is a despairing cry, torn out of a place bruised and battered by four and a half years of blind hatred and misery. She doesn't know what he *wants.* "You wouldn't mourn me if Voldemort did succeed."

Malfoy's tight grip on her hair eases, and when he combs out a loose knot at the end, she can feel that his hand is shaking. "I'll mourn," he says, and he's not looking away, and he's not letting go of her wrist-

Harry reeled away, Severus' grip on her mind broken at last. She was ashen, her eyes wide and shocked and shamed.

"Miss Potter," Severus began, his voice heavy with apology and pity, but Harry shook her head sharply, silencing him. She thrust one hand through her hair, short and disordered, chopped as if it had disgusted her. Now Severus knew why.

"I'm sorry," Harry said. Someone else might have thought she spoke without emotion. "I have to go."

Severus didn't try to call her back. He had already committed the unforgiveable, and he was the last person to offer advice about unsuitable relationships.

He could only hope that she was running to her friends, and not to Draco Malfoy.


End file.
